eLBX Online Day 11 – Why Gamify Your Learning

Are you looking to engage your learners and encourage them to embrace your training material on a deeper level? Do you want them to lean in until they know your learning content as well as you do? If so, game-based is the answer.

Today’s webinar showcased best practices in using games to enhance your training and improve your learning results. We were joined by the amazing Stephen Baer, Head of Creative at The Game Agency. Stephen is also a gaming columnist for Forbes, and previously worked at Atari. He’s been in the gaming industry for over 15 years. We love having Stephen on our webinars—his passion for effective learning games is infectious.

Why Games?

Stephen’s elevator pitch for games is this: It’s common knowledge that employees are distracted, not stimulated, and crave feedback. Games engage people, increase their attention, sustain focus, and drive critical performance improvement.

Any Game Can Be a Training Game

During the webinar, Stephen polled the audience on their favorite games. Turns out, we had a lot of PS4 players online with us today! From there, Stephen talked about how any game can be a training game. Three key things all games have in common are:

• Rules
• Strategies
• Goals

With those things, you can create a game that focuses on whatever learning content you want—giving your employees a safe place to fail and learn, while reinforcing knowledge and improving retention. In the webinar, Stephen dove into some more concrete examples and explanations of these ideas.

Missed this webinar? Don’t worry, we’ll be posting all the recordings at the end of the week. The xAPI archive from last week is available now.

This week is all about gamification. Register for more webinars below.